Seychelles seeing Covid spike despite being the most vaccinated nation
 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...-Rn92sZOo3DFxo


”The Seychelles, which has fully vaccinated over 60% of its population against Covid-19, is bringing back restrictions amid a rise in cases.

The archipelago of nearly 100,000 people recorded close to 500 new cases in the three days to 1 May and has about 1,000 active cases.

A third of the active cases involved people who had had two vaccine doses, the country's news agency said.

The rest had either had a single dose or were unvaccinated.”

What vaccination brand? Some a lot better than others.
From the link

SinoPharm -> same story in Chile!

Curious to see if it has any effect on hospitalizations and deaths. I hope so!

What’s the situation with new cases in Chile? I read a few weeks ago that they released data saying Sinopharm was relatively effective.

I’m particularly interested in this as I’m getting my second Sinopharm jab next week. Being based in Shanghai, I don’t have much choice in vaccines.

Oh wow, it's almost like the vaccine does not prevent you from catching or spreading COVID. This is something we have known all along. This disease is going to become endemic as every expert has been saying for months. Stop all the theater, open up and learn to live with it. The only alternative is staying locked up forever. There is no timeline where covid is eradicated.

I agree. The only thing is that when you get hints of a new more dangerous strain such as what we saw in the UK in December or now in India, countries should stop flights to that particular country.

India's sudden rise is wrongly credited to relaxing Covid measures, but that is not correct as many 3rd world countries were as relaxed as India without seeing anything near India's deadly spike, which is definitely because of its that particular strain

My guess is: The SinoPharm vaccine is protecting pretty well against serious disease and death, but it's not as effective against Covid19 spreading in your body.
The exciting question is: How likely is it that (SinoPharm)-vaccinated people can spread the virus?

The issue with every vaccine: No vaccine in the world can protect your body from getting infected with the virus. What a vaccine does is to train your immune system to quickly fight the virus so that the virus cannot cause disease.

My assumption (which I cannot prove so far) is that the mRNA-based vaccines (e.g. BioNTech, Moderna, Curevac) are more effective in training the immune system to quickly kill the virus -> so that a fully-vaccinated person is much less likely to be able to spread the virus.

I see no evidence the Indian strain is any more dangerous. It's more media hysteria. The data shows India reporting ~3,000 dead/day. India has 1.5 BILLION people. The U.S. was logging 5,000+ dead/day at the height of the pandemic, for India to be in a similar place that would be 30,000 dead/day. Their #s are like 400-600 people/day dying in the U.S.

The big question is whether those people are seriously ill. If not, then it's no big deal (although it proves how nonsensical is the concept of vaccination passports). The virus is here to stay, the key is to protect the health care and avoid deaths / serious long-term consequences.

I'm sceptical as to how much would this be useful. People will always be able to take indirect flights and the strain will also spread via other countries that don't have such ban in place. Since there will always be some mobility, any strain with evolutionary advantage will eventually find its way in. The high price of isolationism will usually get us few weeks at most.

You need to consider age in this equation too. India in 2020 had an estimated median age of 28.4 vs. the US at 38.3, adjusting for age of population things look a bit different. Agree it's probably a bit too early to jump to conclusions regarding the Indian variant yet though.

Hi,

Also the Indian official death count is likely to be undercounting the number of deaths . Media reports based on number of crematorium burials for some cities suggest the actual number of deaths might be up to 10x the official death toll.
it is likely a fully accurate number will not be available as the crematorium cases might not all be covid.

Regards

Tbs

just some additional data for comparison (can't really compare directly)

Breakthrough cases are covid infections at least 14 days after final dose
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-1...ugh-cases.html

No breakdown of which vaccine (mRNA or j&j):
95+million fully vaccinated
9k+ breakthrough (likely undercounted, data is self reported)
27% of 9k are asymptomatic
9% of 9k are hospitalized (29% of these were asymptomatic or hospitalized due to noncovid reasons)
1% of 9k are death (15% of deaths due to noncovid reasons)
​​​​​

Out of fully vaccination, ratio of people taking each type of vaccine :
54.6million people took pfizer
43.2million people took moderna
8.4million people took j&j
(This is just people completing the full dosage requirement. Some have completed it recently and need to wait the 14days before it's considered peak effective)

Sinovac is far less effective than other vaccines - it’s closer to 50% at reducing symptomatic infections, 65% deaths.

Some simple arithmetic: 9,000 divided by 95,000,000 equals 0.0095% chance of getting covid after vaccination. Although this number seems very low, the important number is the chance of getting covid in a given period of time such as 1 year. If we assume that the average time since vaccination among this population of 95 million people is 1 month, then the chance of getting covid is about 0.11% in one year (0.0095 x 12). However, as more and more people in the whole population get vaccinated, that rate should go down because vaccinated people don't transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated people.

Those numbers contrast strongly with what's going on in the Seychelles. According to Bloomberg, the population is 98,000 and there are 1,068 cases - nearly 1.1% of the population is positive for covid. That's the case even though 62.2% of the population is fully vaccinated with either Sinopharm (59% of vaccines) or Covishield (41%; Covishield is a version of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine produced in India). One third of the positive cases (around 356) are in vaccinated individuals, which means that the infection rate is 356 / (98,000 x 0.622) = 0.6%. Using the same equation, we can find the infection rate among non-vaccinated Seychellois: 712 / (98,000 x 0.378) = 1.9%. So the vaccines used in the Seychelles appear to be about 32% effective (0.6 / 1.9).
[The strikethrough part is what I wrote originally, but it is wrong. The following is correct:] This means that 6 out of 1000 vaccinated people became positive for covid, whereas 19 out of 1000 non-vaccinated people became positive. So, 68% fewer vaccinated than non-vaccinated people were infected. This is about what we'd expect for the Sinopharm and AZ vaccines. There are simply going to be more breakthrough cases if the vaccine efficacy is 68% than if if it's 90+%. And in order to see the big drop in cases that, for instance, Israel saw when they hit a similar fraction (58%) of vaccinated people with the Pfizer vaccine, the Seychelles will have to vaccinate a larger fraction with these less efficacious vaccines to see a similar decline.

To summarize, as far as I can tell after having done the math correctly (thanks to RTWonSAT for correcting me!), there is nothing surprising or necessarily alarming about the Seychelles' high case numbers after vaccination.

These number are really concerning. We clearly can't simply conclude that "vaccines don't work" because the US data indicates that our vaccines do work against the variants that are here (vaccinated people here have a much lower infection rate than vaccinated people in the Seychelles). Why are the vaccines not working in the Seychelles? The Sinopharm vaccine is roughly 50% effective, and the Astra-Zeneca is better - but the common variants in the Seychelles may be ones that these vaccines don't work well against. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be good data (at least publicly available) about what those variants are.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...as-cases-surge